It’s May, and with May and spring and new growth and bright leaves and flowering trees comes allergies. What is my favorite season with the best skies (when the grey of an oncoming storm is lit from behind you, and the rolling clouds you see are the backdrop of the most beautiful yellow green of new leaves) is a nightmare of medications and hiding indoors depending on the daily pollen count. This year seems especially bad, though it’s the first year I’ve bothered checking the numbers so I can’t really say for sure.
I’ve been reading a lot, and doing very little else. Which is not to say I’ve been doing a lot - just more reading than other activities. Time at a premium makes me overly ambitious; but the reality of what can be accomplished also puts me in a dissociative state. Also I’m just mentally/emotionally exhausted from two jobs.
I’ve been listening to a lot of music from the late 80’s and early 90’s - music of my youth that’s not classified as “Classic Rock” - leaving me feeling a little old and a little sad, not that I have any grey hairs to show for it. I would love some grey hairs. Aside from the spare white eyebrow hair that pops out of nowhere when I’m especially stressed out, I have nothing.
Despite all of that, My book project is underway! I have preliminary specs in for a price estimate, and 17 percent of the pages finished. It won’t be completed for at least a year - perhaps longer. I am hoping once my class is over I can buckle down and paint a large quantity of pages before work picks up in late summer. Even after the pages are finished there will be process to set up - gold ink and spot UV and other surprises. Something beautiful and chaotic and lovely, because I can’t focus on one thing for long enough to create something that makes sense - so the only thing left to do is lean into what i can do - things that don’t have to make sense. Assuming it doesn’t go the way of that deck of cards I illustrated - complete and unprinted.